And who would have imagined that the training for the mind and the training for the body went hand in hand?
Let's deepen a study conducted by Howard Gardner, a professor at the American University of Harvard, who for years has been working on a fascinating theory that man has multiple forms of intelligence, one of which is a motor intelligence that directs the body towards ability and orientates towards automatism aimed at improving sports performance.
Training and the mind: when moving means thinking
It is said that when a movement, whatever it is, it becomes automatic, the body has taken over a portion of the discipline that is deepening. As the mind does with concepts and notions, the body also remembers .
The concrete example? Starting a sport means trying out a wide range of movements that are initially unrelated to the brain. The first messy racquet shots, the unlikely attempts at dribbles are examples of actions that engage large areas of the brain, as they relate to the first phase of learning .
When instead the practice is deepened, the metabolism becomes accustomed and, at the mental level, a form of cognitive automatism is triggered in the brain by virtue of which work more restricted areas: essentially, part of the basal ganglia, the primary motor cortex and the cerebellum .
Internal memory of muscles
Once the learning phase has been overcome, the body develops an autonomous memory, as if it were moving without the help of thought. The central nervous system acts as a bridge between visual and motor capacity: the eyes capture the information that is translated into patterns of muscle activation. Imagine that every single muscle has an archive in it, a folder that contains various gestures in the form of files, a reservoir of actions.
Varying training techniques is important because it means developing the widest possible motor intelligence. Global training includes several movements that are performed simultaneously.
For example, a hockey player does not first learn to skate, then to drive the disc, and then to follow the game, but he immediately gets used to managing everything together.
Learning different instructions at the same time is a bit like tuning the instruments of the same orchestra : the motor system is in fact made up of networks of cells connected to each other, with different but overlapping tasks.
